Mesrine

Mesrine tells the story of the real-life French gangster Jacques Mesrine (pronounced Merine), who was active as a bank robber, kidnapper, gun-runner and occasional radical in the 1960s and 1970s. He was finally gunned down in a deliberate execution by the French police in 1979, an execution that opens the movie before returning to the late 1950s when Mesrine returns to Paris from Algeria.

The movie is four hours long, and is presented in two parts: “Part I: Killer Instinct” (loosely based on Mesrine’s autobiography); and “Part II: Public Enemy #1.” Part I takes us from Algeria (where the brutality of the French occupying force is on full display) to Mesrine’s escape from a maximum security prison in Canada in 1973. Part II picks up the story back in Paris and goes to his death. It doesn’t break any new movie ground, but it is entirely engrossing for the full 240 minutes, primarily because of the electrifying performance from Vincent Cassel, in the role of Mesrine. He is onscreen for almost the entire film, and we see Cassel transform himself from a dapper gangster to a sideburned and bearded hipster with a paunch. It is all but impossible not to like the character for large stretches of the movie, but every so often Cassel will display a volcanic and brutal temper, as when he beats a journalist to death or buries a pimp alive. There are other good performances, including those of the trio of women who attach themselves to Mesrine over the course of two decades, and even Gerard Depardieu gets to play an unusually subdued gangster (a relief from so many of his over-the-top recent performances), but no one can compete with Cassel’s magnetism.

The movie is overly fragmented — we get one set-piece after another with no explanation of how they fit together — and has a slight tendency toward melodrama, but this is well worth watching. The final scene, which plays out the police planning of his execution, and demonstrates just how terrified the police were of Mesrine by the end, is especially good. Recommended.